CFTC to Host Cryptocurrency CEO Forum to Discuss Digital Asset Market Pilot Program

Beating AI Express News: xAI officially launched Grok 4.7 on Monday, with the company noting it delivers "significant improvements" over Grok 4.6 at the same price and speed points. Grok 4.7 had been delayed at least five times prior to launch, and is now available on the Grok app, Cursor, Grok Build, and the xAI API. The model has a parameter size of 2.1 trillion, a 40% jump from Grok 4.6’s 1.5 trillion, with input and output pricing set at $2 and $6 per million tokens respectively. xAI also incorporated supplementary training data from SpaceX, including Starlink satellite telemetry, manufacturing records, and engineering failure logs, to boost the model’s reasoning capabilities for hardware and physical systems. In benchmarks, Grok 4.7 ranked second in both GDPval and AA-Briefcase, scoring 1695 and 1657 respectively, trailing Claude Fable 5.1’s 1735 and 1678. It also placed second in the electrical engineering benchmark EEBench, behind only GPT-6 Astra. CursorBench 4.0 data shows Grok 4.7 has higher task costs than GPT-6 Astra and Claude Sonnet 5, while its overall performance still lags behind Fable 5.1. Musk previously stated Grok 4.7 is roughly on par with Claude Opus 5.0, though it has not reached the level of the newer Opus 5.1, and revealed Grok 4.8, 4.9, and Grok 5 are in active development.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has launched the Pontes platform, allowing banks to settle tokenized asset transactions using wholesale central bank currency. The platform is independent of the retail-facing digital euro pilot project. The ECB plans to invest in securities issued and settled in tokenized form via the new Pontes platform. This will mark the first time a major central bank has directly participated in blockchain-based financial markets in the dual capacity of an investor and an infrastructure provider.

According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, Nvidia (NVDA.O) has committed to privately subscribe $1.5 billion in Class N common stock of SB Energy. The chipmaker will make a total investment of $3 billion in SB Energy via this public offering.

Fairshake, a political action committee (PAC) focused on the crypto industry, plans to invest $30 million in the Ohio Senate election to oppose former Senator Sherrod Brown. The move comes just days after the Senate failed to pass comprehensive digital asset legislation. Fairshake has launched a multi-million dollar campaign targeting Brown, its most aggressive action ahead of this year’s November midterm elections. A Fairshake spokesperson confirmed the $30 million spending amount, noting that more midterm election spending decisions are expected to be announced in the coming days or weeks.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), the Nasdaq 100 index has extended its gains to 2.5%.

According to official data, zkSNARKs, an NFT project in the Zcash (ZEC) ecosystem, has broken its issue price, with its floor price currently standing at 0.5 ZEC (approximately $749). Previous reports indicated that the final clearing settlement reserve price for zkSNARKs' auction was 1.5 ZEC. @LeonidasNFT, a well-known builder in the Bitcoin inscriptions era, publicly accused the zkSNARKs team of being a serial "entrepreneur" in the Ordinals space, noting that most of their projects are scams.